I've been covering the business of news, information and entertainment in one form or another for more than 10 years. In February 2014, I moved to San Francisco to cover the tech beat. My primary focus is social media and digital media, but I'm interested in other aspects, including but not limited to the sharing economy, lifehacking, fitness & sports tech and the evolving culture of the Bay Area. In past incarnations I've worked at AOL, Conde Nast Portfolio, Radar and WWD. Circle me on Google+, follow me on Twitter or send me tips or ideas at jbercovici@forbes.com.

Make CNN The Google Of News: Radical Unsolicited Advice For Jeff Zucker

What business is CNN in? Is it the business of informing viewers of what’s happening in the world? Or is it the business of keeping them looking at a screen long enough to show them several commercials?

This is not a facetious question, and it’s one worth a fresh look as the network embarks under a new era under Jeff Zucker. Conventional wisdom says CNN is in the latter business, and doing rather poorly at it.

Conventional critiques — and I admit to having authored my share of them — say that CNN has been steadily losing ground over the past decade to Fox News and MSNBC, with their lineups of primetime opinion shows. These shows are ideal, from their networks’ perspectives, because viewers who tune in tend to stay tuned in for a while, resulting in high levels for the average number of viewers watching at any given moment of the hour.

CNN viewers, in contrast, tend to drop in and bounce out quickly. CNN hosts so many viewers of this drive-by variety that it beats both Fox and MSNBC when it comes to cumulative audience, ie. the total number of human beings who see its shows in a given period.

The problem is that advertising agencies make their buys based on average audience, not cumulative audience. Thus the conventional wisdom: When it comes to the kind of viewership that translates into revenues, CNN is falling ever farther behind.

“Best of all,” he writes, “is when you can say that they didn’t have the courage of their convictions, and that your plan is what they’d have done if they’d followed through on their own insights. Google was that type of idea….The search engines that preceded them shied away from the most radical implications of what they were doing — particularly that the better a job they did, the faster users would leave. ”

Sound familiar?

When Google came along, AOL and Yahoo were much bigger in search, but because they didn’t have an efficient way of making money at it, they opted to play the time-and-attention game. In so doing, they “shied away form the most radical implications of what they were doing,” in Graham’s phrase. They became portals that used search (and email) as entry points, then beguiled the users who came for those tools into sticking around until they could be monetized adequately. Search users then ditched them for Google, which actually got them the results they were looking for without a bunch of distractions.

Just as AOL and Yahoo were only ostensibly search engines, Fox News and MSNBC are only ostensibly news networks. Looked at properly, they’re entertainment networks that use the news as a hook to snag viewers, then keep them around as long as possible.

What would a CNN that embraced the most radical implications of what it does look like? It would be a network that knows its job is to inform people in an efficient manner. It wouldn’t try to keep them in their chairs with pundit round-tables or endless crane shots of a podium where we are just moments away from whatever. It would be a network that never took six minutes to tell you something it could tell you in four. It would be a network that sent viewers on their way as quickly as possible, counting on their satisfaction in getting what they came for to bring them back often.

This is an idea that’s already starting to seem less radical, thanks to the internet. One of the video news start-ups I’m keeping a close eye on is NowThis News. Backed by HuffPost veterans Ken Lerer and Eric Hippeau, it’s big on quick and creative news summaries and tightly edited explainers. It’s not big on we are just moments away from vamping.

Can CNN figure out how to make money off a mode of news delivery that doesn’t involve immobilizing viewers? It already has. As Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes noted at a media conference this week, CNN generates annual profits of $600 million and that’s growing at double digits. The more video news consumption is something that takes place in on-demand bits and bites on computers and mobile devices, the less CNN’s fragmented but huge and loyal audience is going to seem like an inferior version of “real” television viewing than like the new normal. When that happens, the tyranny of average audience will be broken.

In a press call with reporters Thursday morning, Zucker sounded like a man who understood that CNN is better positioned for the future than its critics think. “The fact is if we allow our competition to be defined only by the partisan political cable networks, that’s a mistake,” he said. “Our competition today is anybody who competes for eyeballs and time and attention and produces nonfiction programming.”

My advice to Zucker: Embrace the radical implications of what CNN is doing. And if you’re ever feeling the pull of conventional wisdom, just think: Who would you rather be — Google or Yahoo?

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Embracing the radical implications of what CNN is doing, as in applying the lessons from Google…I’m not sure how that translates as well in cable. There is no link to sell, unless you’re talking about smart TVs and all that nonsense.

Hey Jeff. Not suggesting that I know the answer here, but isn’t that what Headline News tried to do? At this point they’ve moved on from that model, but I’ve got to imagine that it wasn’t financially sustainable if they gave up on it.